Category: reason

Is Obamacare back in action? For the last two
months, Healthcare.gov, the federally run insurance portal at the
heart of the law, has experienced numerous technical troubles. The
administration vowed to fix those problems by the end of November,
and today, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
announced that it had met the goal of making sure that the site
“worked smoothly” for the “vast majority of users.”

In a conference call this morning, a spokesperson for HHS

said, “we believe we have met that goal.” A
six-page progress report released by the administration this
morning touts technical progress as well as managerial
improvements, declaring that the team making the improvements is
now “operating with private sector velocity and efficiency.”

Anyone else catch the irony there? Set up a vast,
government-managed tech operation, watch it fail—and then, as it
attempts to reboot itself, boast of private-sector quality
work?  (Also, let’s not forget that the original failed work
was in fact done by private contractors working under the
managerial bumbling of the federal health bureaucracy.)

So it’s all fixed, and Obamacare’s going to be great, right? Not
so fast. The White House’s
stated goal of improving the website so that 80 percent of
users can get all the way through the system still means that one
in five users won’t make it through the digital gauntlet. It also
claims that the site is stable and accessible 90 percent of the
time, a figure it only gets by excluding the hours of scheduled
maintenance it undergoes each day.

And that’s if the website even works as well as the
administration says it’s supposed to. Which is, at best, a very big
if.
According to The Washington Post, some progress has
been made, but the techies and bureaucrats attempting to patch
together the site have not fully met their own internal goals for
performance yet. That would certainly fit the pattern. All
throughout the development of the online insurance exchange system,
the administration has claimed that Obamacare’s tech is working, or
just about to work—but its promises have repeatedly been proven
wrong.

Given its history, the administration’s claims have to be taken
with a cargo ship full of salt—especially since there’s no good way
to independently confirm that the website is working as well as the
administration claims. You just have to
take their word for it.

Even if the website appears to be working on the user end,
there’s no guarantee that less visible functions are performing
adequately. Insurers have been reporting dropped or incorrectly
transmitted enrollment data since the exchanges launched. And

according to The New York Times, the repair team
prioritized front-end fixes for consumers over accurate
insurance-company connections. So the site might appear to be
working just fine, until you try to actually use the insurance that
you thought you purchased. 

These are just the known problems. There are plenty more
opportunities for technical troubles down the line, particularly
because when administration officials say the website is working
better, they mean the portion of the website that’s actually been
built. Yet by the reckoning of a senior Obamacare tech official,

some 30 to 40 percent of the exchange functionality has yet to
been constructed, including some of the crucial insurer payment
systems. (“It’s not built, let alone tested,” one insurance
industry official
told The Washington Post.”) So the best possible
scenario here is that the 70 percent of the site that’s been built
works for about 80 percent of the people who want to use
it. 

If you put a bunch of people who identify
as feminists into a room with a bunch of people who identify as
free market capitalists, they would likely have some strained
conversations. At best. They just don’t roll with the same crowds.
This is a shame, argues Zenon Evans, because feminists are actually
quite savvy at operating within the voluntary mechanisms of the
free market system.

View this article.

Sunday morning yak shows got you down? Then check
out this November 14 episode of John Stossel’s eponymous Fox
Business show. Titled “The Rise of Libertarians?” Stossel talks
with, among others, Ron Paul, Penn Jillette, Matt Welch, and me to
figure out whether believers in social tolerance and fiscal
responsibility really are taking over the country. Stossel also
talks to folks from the fast-growing Students for Liberty group and
gets a negative take on “Free Minds and Free Markets” from The
Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes.

The YouTube vid of the show clips the commercials. Matt Welch
and I show up around the 2.30 minute mark, in the show’s first
segment.

Take a look – I’m pretty certain this will be far more
interesting than anything currently showing up on this morning’s
broadcast and cable chin-stroke-athons.

For more on Stossel’s show, go
here.

Sunday morning yak shows got you down? Then check
out this November 14 episode of John Stossel’s eponymous Fox
Business show. Titled “The Rise of Libertarians?” Stossel talks
with, among others, Ron Paul, Penn Jillette, Matt Welch, and me to
figure out whether believers in social tolerance and fiscal
responsibility really are taking over the country. Stossel also
talks to folks from the fast-growing Students for Liberty group and
gets a negative take on “Free Minds and Free Markets” from The
Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes.

The YouTube vid of the show clips the commercials. Matt Welch
and I show up around the 2.30 minute mark, in the show’s first
segment.

Take a look – I’m pretty certain this will be far more
interesting than anything currently showing up on this morning’s
broadcast and cable chin-stroke-athons.

For more on Stossel’s show, go
here.

For $99, the company 23andMe
can run a quick, rudimentary test on your spit and give you a
readout of who you are on a molecular level and crunch some numbers
on predispositions to various sorts of ailments and conditions.

“In its infinite wisdom,” writes Nick Gillespie,

the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has forbidden the
personal genetic testing
service 23andMe from soliciting
new customers, claiming the company hasn’t
proven the validity of its
product. The real reason? Because when it comes
to learning about your own goddamn genes, the FDA doesn’t
think you can handle the truth. That means the FDA is now
officially worse than Oedipus’s parents, Dr. Zaius, and the god of
Genesis combined, telling us that there are things that us mere
mortals just shouldn’t be allowed to know.

View this article.

Despite what you might have learned
from old government-sponsored black-and-white educational films or
hippie-era exploitation flicks, psychedelic drugs do not drive you
inexorably insane, writes Brian Doherty. A new, peer-reviewed study
examined survey results from over 130,000 U.S. adults, more than
21,000 of whom had used psychedelics, and found there are “no
significant associations between lifetime use of any psychedelics,
lifetime use of specific psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline,
peyote), or past year use of LSD and increased rate of any of the
mental health outcomes” they examined.

View this article.

Did you know that Reason
magazine, Reason.com, and Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that
publishes this website) publishes 10 different email newsletters
covering topics such as breaking news, what’s new at Reason.com,
and policy areas ranging from privatization to air-traffic control
to education?

Sign up for any
or all here.

Reason TV’s YouTube channel has about 87,000 subscribers, who
can get automatic notifications when we make new material live
online. Go here to
sign up for that (takes about a minute).

Reason’s Facebook page has about 116,000 likes but we’d love to
have twice that many. We post several times a day to Facebook and
the comment threads there are a great way to learn just what we’re
doing right and, more commonly, just how goddamned stupid we really
are. Check it
out – and while you’re there, give us a like, won’t you?

We’ve got two Twitter feeds, one for the site as a whole and one
for our nonstop rat-a-tat newsfeed Reason 24/7, which gives you
the latest breaking news that is of particular interest to
libertarians and other beautiful, clean-smelling smart
people. 

And rumor has it that we push a monthly magazine too, in both
dead-tree and digital versions for every once and future reading
device, for less than $15 a year. Check it out here.

As noted above, all of Reason’s platforms are published by the
nonprofit Reason Foundation. Donations to the foundation are
tax-deductible and they help to let us keep bringing you the latest
news and analysis from a “Free Minds and Free Markets” perspective
you’re not going to find anywhere else. Go here to read about
how we use your (tax-deductible!) donations. And yes, we do take
Bitcoin!

And note that we’re going to be running our annual webathon from
December 3 through December 12, during which we’ll be soliciting
donations and giving away fun and interesting swag. Stay tuned for
more info on giving levels.

Try-hard gamer (and Daily Beast National Security
writer) Eli Lake dishes on how online play in Grand Theft
Auto V (GATV) became boring once he learned cheats that
allowed him to dominate the mean streets of Los Santos:

In real life, the sudden accumulation of wealth may lead one to
buy nice clothes, take a vacation, give to a charity or make sound
investments. But in the world of grand theft auto, I spent my
glitched cash on more lethal goods and services. I purchased a
tank. I purchased an attack helicopter. I purchased a sniper rifle.
Those were the goods. As for the services, I now had money to send
mercenaries and airstrikes against players I did not like. Yes, the
game has something called “Merryweather Security” because
“everybody needs a private army.”

It was payback time. I went after as many of my tormentors as I
could find. I no longer worried about dying either. With millions
in my in game account, why did it matter? It was exhilarating going
from hunted to hunter. Nor did I feel any guilt about cheating.
This is, after all, a game where you pretend to be a criminal.

But the joke it turns out was on me. Once the challenge was
removed, the game stopped being fun. After a while it gets boring
coming up with new ways to kill other players.

Read the whole thing.

You want something that never gets boring? Read Lake’s
terrifying 2010 piece for Reason, “The
9/14 Presidency: Barack Obama is operating with the war powers
granted George W. Bush three days after the 9/11 attacks.”

Back in September, when GATV first came out, I wrote
about how videogames are the great art form of the 21st century for
Time.com.
Read that here.

I appeared on the final panel at this past summer’s Freedom Fest
in Las Vegas. Freedom Fest is the planet’s largest annual gathering
of libertarians and free-market types, pulling together 2,000-plus
folks to discuss and debate every possible topic under the sun,
from Bitcoin to drone strikes to laissez-faire history. The theme
for this year’s event was “Are We Rome?”

Here’s the writeup for the final panel, which was originally
posted at Reason.tv on November 1. Go here for
more links and downloadable versions.

The final panel at Freedom Fest 2013 was titled “Are We Rome?”
and featured Reason’s Nick Gillespie, publisher Steve Forbes, Tea
Party Express head Jenny Beth Martin, writer Wayne Allyn Root, and
investment guru Jim Rogers.

At one point, Rogers noted that about half of Americans lived in
households who were getting direct payments from the federal
government, a situation he felt made real political change next to
impossible. 

“Fifty percent of the country is getting a free lunch, said
Gillespie, “but nobody wants a shit sandwich anymore. And that’s
what you’re getting in terms of education, health care and
retirement.”

Moderated by conference organizer Mark Skousen, the panel
discussed a wide variety of topics including government spending,
regulation, foreign policy, the drug war, and more.

Held each July in Las Vegas, Freedom Fest is attended by more
than 2,000 limited-government enthusiasts and libertarians. Each
year, Reason TV talks with dozens of activists, speakers, and
authors such as David Boaz of the Cato Institute, economist Peter
Boettke, publisher Jeffrey Tucker, journalist Gene Epstein, legal
scholar Randy Barnett, and tax advocate Grover Norquist. For a
playlist of 2013 videos, go
here.

About 45 minutes. Video courtesy of Mark and Jo Ann Skousen.

After a report in August revealed more than 3,000
violations of privacy rules by employees of the National Security
Agency (NSA) in a one-year period, NSA Chief Compliance Officer
John DeLong hurried to reassure reporters that only “a couple of”
those infractions were willful. Pressed to clarify about what
happened in those cases, writes Katherine Mangu-Ward, the NSA
admitted that it knew about several instances where employees were
using the agency’s incredible spying power to check in on the
communications of overseas love interests.

View this article.